A
most extraordinary conclusion!
... God
Etc
Wednesday, 26 March 2008
“Christianity may not be generally necessary for science but it was
certainly necessary for the emergence of science in our culture.”
This statement is interesting, not just because it is from the ever
irrepressible blogger Bryan Appleyard,
but because it would seem as if the Gods themselves were protective of this
unseeing man. And considering that the biggest threat to the emergence of
science came from within his religion, it is also, by any measure, a most
extraordinary conclusion.
It is true, Islam had a tendency to gain converts through violence, whereas
Christianity proceeded in the intimate and academic confines of the medieval
monastery. But even at my most insane, I would not for one moment refute, that
it was Islamic and Arabic culture which kept alive the philosophy of Aristotle
through the Dark Ages. If anything, Islam was the religion of reason -
Christianity, a trinity inspired by the cult of art. Mathematics and medical
science were developed in the Islamic world. And - just for the sake of being
encyclopaedic - it is here where the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian cultures
flourished, which gave us the wheel, writing and arithmetic. The fact that
there was any scientific progress at all within Christianity, says a great deal
for the persistence and devotion of men such as Bruno, Galileo, Descartes,
Copernicus and many others who intrinsically opposed it - but it was
fundamentally the influence of the Greek philosophers, whose work provided the
bedrock of the Renaissance, which replaced religion with logic.
Nor did Pythagoras only teach his disciples to abstain from eating animals.
Two and a half thousand years ago, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras and,
most importantly, Archimedes and Euclid took the surviving legacies from what
was known of Babylonian and Egyptian culture and began the process of
quantifying, calculating and evaluating them. Euclid's Elements, was the
primary source of geometric reasoning throughout Western history, at least
until the advent of non-Euclidean geometry and irrational numbers, in the
nineteenth century. Scientists of the Huxley-Darwin era who proclaimed the
existence of a body of knowledge based on observable facts, too, were a deep embarrassment
to the Christian Church. And to tell the whole truth, centuries of
discrimination masked the extent of the Jewish contribution. In the second half
of the 20th century, Jews received 29% of all Nobel prizes. Among the most
famous recipients were Albert Einstein, the physicist and Milton Friedman, the
economist.
My point, gentlemen, essentially is that so far as science and religion are
concerned, they are merely two different ways of striving for the same
deliverance. Today we are excited about scientific advances, notably in the
fields of neuroscience, genetics and nanotechnology. But even when leaving
aside the question of whether it is possible to reduce all of nature’s
complexity into one single strand of causality, anyone who is capable of
following a still more transfigurative hope, will also be able to see the
unification of physics not only as a scientific discipline in the reductionist
sense, but precisely in its cultural context as an evolved form of gnosis.
The result, therefore, is not a lack of belief in God but a lack of belief in a
“religious” God.
Certainly in the sense that there is little real discrepancy and practically no
incompatibility between the visionary and the scientist who are surely
indivisible in the whole nature of our perception of space and time as some
kind of inward and outward unity. Indeed, the most significant feature of The
Theory of Everything is the new answers it aims to give to the ancient problems
of ontology. And I, personally, would strongly suggest that it represents
something like a synthesis of science, philosophy, and the world-view it aims
to transcend, and that it may, together with that other great conceptual
accomplishment in theoretical physics, the quantum theory, even offer us the
supreme contemplative achievement of modern civilization in the West.
Its spirit is profoundly religious!
Melancholy, inward looking and austere, orthodox Christianity is, by
contradistinction, little more than an accretion of cultural norms. It simply
cannot exist in an ideological vacuum. It has nothing to offer but history. It
is no longer a religion. It is an institutional ailment. And this constitutes
the tragic greatness and, at the same time, the greatest weakness of Western
culture. There is no future to its dogma. For it is precisely from its future
expectations, that derives the force and beauty of a species.
Dreamy
Posted by
Selena Dreamy at Wednesday,
March 26, 2008
27
March 2008 10:18 HYPERLINK
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